


An Avalanche

by xpityx



Series: Star Wars Fics [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy/Hopeful Ending, Grief/Mourning, Multi, No adultery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27561838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xpityx/pseuds/xpityx
Summary: Padmé had been six years old when she’d first seen death.A baby bird had fallen from a nest in the high Akia tree onto the small terrace that jutted out from beneath her bedroom window. She’d heard it cry out as it fell and had rushed to climb over the windowsill and out onto the stone roof beyond, though she knew she would be in trouble for going out there alone.The bird had been huddled on the edge of the terrace and even before she’d touched it she’d known it was dead. Nothing but absolute stillness lay under its soft feathers as they’d fluttered in the breeze. No breath, no thought, nothing. Not then and never again.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Series: Star Wars Fics [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2044219
Comments: 38
Kudos: 50
Collections: favourite fics from a galaxy far far away





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> EVERYONE HOLD UP ONE SECOND. I know I have done a terrible thing here but I promise I’m going to fix it. Okay? Okay. Please carry on. 
> 
> Thank you as always to my babe slumberoustrash for the beta, title and lyrics from Leonard Cohen's _[Avalanche.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f0ADuVJhYQ)_

**Prologue**

Padmé had been six years old when she’d first seen death. 

A baby bird had fallen from a nest in the high Akia tree onto the small terrace that jutted out from beneath her bedroom window. She’d heard it cry out as it fell and had rushed to climb over the windowsill and out onto the stone roof beyond, though she knew she would be in trouble for going out there alone. 

The bird had been huddled on the edge of the terrace and even before she’d touched it she’d known it was dead. Nothing but absolute stillness lay under its soft feathers as they’d fluttered in the breeze. No breath, no thought, nothing. Not then and never again. 

For some reason she recalled the stillness of that bird when Obi-Wan contacted her via holovid, late that evening when she should have been in bed. Moté had told her she had a call coming through on her private line and she’d abandoned the sleep plait she’d been putting in her hair, hurrying over to her comms unit and expecting to see Ani’s dear face waiting to greet her. 

But it was only Obi-Wan, standing so still for a moment she thought the holovid had glitched.

“Padmé,” he greeted her.

“Obi-Wan? Is everything alright?” she asked, settling more comfortably into the chair and expecting him to ask her if she’d heard from Anakin lately. She thought that something about his childhood led him to rebel against the idea of being answerable for his whereabouts at all times, so often either she or Obi-Wan knew where he was, but rarely both at the same time. 

“Padmé,” Obi-Wan said again, and then nothing else. 

She listened for the hum of a bad line, the static of a cut connection, but there was only the sound of Obi-Wan’s breathing and she knew then why he was calling her, why he stood like a man about to break apart, why he could say nothing but her name.

“No. No, no, no.” Her hand flew to her mouth, as if she could keep the truth inside her. “Please, no.”

“It will take at least a week to get back to Coruscant,” Obi-Wan told her, as if he couldn’t hear her begging. “I didn’t want you to find out on the holonet. He’s dead, Padmé. I’m so sorry.”

Padmé pushed away from her desk and stumbled to the fresher when she threw up her dinner and the two slices of cake she had eaten. Timon, her secretary, had brought it to celebrate the birth of his second child.

She retched again, nothing but bile in her throat. 

Some time later Moté came in and wrapped her in a warm dressing gown, giving her a glass of water to drink and a pill to swallow with it. For a terrible moment Padmé hoped it would kill her, that whatever Moté had given her would end her life so she wouldn’t have to go on in this terrible darkness without her husband by her side. 

She cried then, and Moté held her until the sedative pulled her under.


	2. Part I

_I stepped into an avalanche_

_It covered up my soul_

  
  
  


**Part I**

  
  
  


Her days were strange and unreal: blurred by grief. She went from meeting to council session and back again, all the while wondering why no-one could see her pain. Padmé imagined standing up during a discussion on correct debate protocol and announcing that she was a widow. 

She looked in the mirror at night and had to grip the edge of the dresser to stop herself from reaching for the scissors to cut off her hair. She kept the clothes she’d worn when she’d heard of Anakin’s death in order to bury him with them, as was her right. She should be collecting tiny, white _Peine_ flowers to place in the casket, gathering them with her parents and sister out in the fields that ran down behind her home, as she had done for her cousin when he had died. She wanted to sit in perfect silence while mourners came to pay their respects, the ancient clocks in her mother’s sitting room covered to muffle their tick. She imagined first Ashoka and then Obi-Wan coming to tell her they grieved with her. Then they would sit by her and she would be comforted a little by the presence of those who had loved Ani best.

But no-one knew she was a widow, so she sat in her meetings and tried to breathe through her grief—tight like a hand around her throat.

In the end Obi-Wan made the return journey in six days. News of Anakin’s death preceded him by three and Padmé wasn’t sure what was worse: having no-one acknowledge his death or being given condolences by those who had no idea of how desperately she had loved Anakin, had loved her husband.

She expected Obi-Wan to come to her first. He was on the Jedi Council of course, but she couldn’t imagine anything more important to him than the loss of Anakin. As it was, it was past midnight before Moté announced their visitor. 

Padmé stood up but otherwise stayed where she was: she would wait for him to seek comfort from her. They had been friends once, but the pressure of keeping first her relationship and then her marriage a secret had put distance between them. She was sure he had at least known about the former if not the latter, but Anakin was—had been—so worried about Obi-Wan’s reaction that she had quickly stopped expecting him to ever tell him.

When Obi-Wan entered he stopped in the middle of the room and offered a short bow before folding his arms into his robes. He looked tired, as did everyone these days, but otherwise he was as neatly turned out as always.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t expect my meeting with the Council to run on so long,” he apologised.

Padmé took a step towards him then stopped, noticing the increased tension in Obi-Wan at her approach. She swallowed down her disappointment: people dealt with grief in different ways and Obi-Wan was entitled to not seek comfort from her.

“That’s quite alright,” she replied, falling back into well-worn patterns of politeness. “I expect you must be tired.”

“A little, yes.”

“Can I offer you some refreshment?” she asked, sitting back down again as Obi-Wan did the same. She should have sat in another chair, she realised. There was now a great gulf of space between where they were sitting awkwardly distant across the formal sitting room.

“Thank you, but no.”

Padmé looked down at where her hands were twisted together in her lap. She relaxed, smoothing out her heavy skirts with long strokes. 

“Where is he?” she asked suddenly. “I want to see him.”

Obi-Wan blinked, which was an expression of deep surprise for a Jedi.

“Did you not see the news?”

“No, I couldn’t bear to watch it.”

“I’m sorry Padmé, there is no body, we weren’t able to find—”

“No.” She was standing, she found, and her voice came out louder than she had intended.

“You will go and you will bring him back to me, do you understand?” she continued—of all the things she had imagined, not having a body to bury had been a horror that hadn’t even occurred to her. “I am a Senator and you are a servant of the Senate and I command you to bring him back to me!”

Obi-Wan looked up at her: she had walked forward almost into his personal space. He _must_ bring Ani back to her, she would make him understand. It was her right as a widow: to take his heavy limbs in her hands and wash them clean, to line his casket with the clothes she had worn when she’d heard of his death. She would shave her hair and sit in silence for nine days, Anakin’s casket behind her while she waited for mourners to come say their goodbyes. Shmi would come, and Ashoka, and Obi-Wan. Anakin would be taken through the streets, tiny white _Peine_ , the flowers of her family, woven into his hair. She would bury him by the Lakehouse on Naboo and— 

Even in her thoughts she couldn’t go on and she sat heavily on the floor, her skirts crumpling and creased.

“How could you leave him?” she demanded. “He loved you! He was my husband and he loved me, but he always loved you. Always.”

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan replied, and his voice was terrible: empty and quiet. And still he didn’t touch her. “Husband?” he asked.

“We were married, on Naboo,” she told him, and then her tears came. 

Obi-Wan’s hand was warm on her arm where he led her to stand and then to the sofa, but then he was gone, returning with a small towel for her face and sitting down opposite her once again.

“I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

Padmé forced back her tears, swallowing hard. She felt almost ashamed in the face of Obi-Wan’s calm acceptance. She knew he’d loved Anakin, it had always been so clear to her, but all those emotions seemed to be hidden behind his perfect Jedi façade and she could find no crack with which to lever it open. She had hoped to be less lonely with Obi-Wan here, but instead she felt worse. 

“It barely matters now,” she made herself say. “What can you tell me about… about how he died?”

Obi-Wan sat back on the sofa and took a deep breath.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Eating while crying was terrible, but she couldn’t seem to hold her tears off for more than a few tens of minutes at a time. 

She challenged herself to see how many documents she could summarize and sign before she broke down. By the end of the week she would do half her daily reading, sob for twenty minutes with one of Anakin’s robes gripped tightly in her hands, then wash her face and finish her work. 

It was the opposite of healthy, but what else could she do?

She dreamt of the cold hard vacuum of space, Anakin’s last words freezing in his throat before he could voice them. The embedded com-link he’d worn had only been one-way but he must have known she’d hear his last words, even as he suffocated. 

_'No, I’m—’_

_I’m what, my love?_ She asked him, in her dreams. _Are you sorry? Because I am too. You promised me in sickness and in health, and I’m so sick with the loss of you. Come back to me. Please, come back._

She woke up with tears on her face and an ache so deep she could barely bear it.

Obi-Wan had refused to leave her with a copy of the recording of Anakin’s last words, rightly guessing she would only listen to it over and over again. She gripped her sleep braid between her hands, angry with him all over again. Angry with both of them, with all Jedi, and this awful war that had taken Anakin from her. 

He’d told her he was going undercover for a short while, but had given no details. Even with what Obi-Wan had filled in for her she still couldn’t fathom how it had gone so wrong. Only the Jedi Council had been aware of the specifics of his mission: to infiltrate a group of Huttese-speaking pirates on the edge of the Dolos Sector, who’d been stripping ships of a certain alloy used in the Separatist's ion cannons, a fact that had been confirmed by two different sources. Anakin had been given subtle skin implants to change his appearance and a one-way comm for emergencies. His lightsaber he’d left with Obi-Wan.

It was only supposed to take him a few days once he’d been accepted onto the ship, courtesy of being vouched for by someone within the crew who’d been turned by Obi-Wan’s good friend, Master Vos. All he’d had to do was hack the ships systems, find out where they met their contact from the Separatists, then abandon the pirates at the first inhabited rock they came to. An easy feat for someone with Anakin’s technical know-how and his flawless Huttese. But the Captain had somehow discovered who he was, or at least, had discovered there was a spy on her ship. Anakin had been sticking with the other crew at all times but that hadn’t saved him. 

The Captain had disabled the emergency alarms and then vented the storage compartment he’d been working in, blasting Anakin and two of her own crew out into the cold depths of space. According to the comm log he’d survived nearly two minutes before asphyxiating. She imagined him spending his last few moments of life gasping for air, afraid and alone. 

Padmé knew that her whole attention was needed now more than ever. The Separatists had stepped up their regime of terror, both towards those who defied them and those who had declared themselves neutral.

There was a chaotic viciousness to the attacks that she had not seen before from the Separatists. Yes, they were unmerciful, and had proved time and time again that the Galactic War Convention meant nothing to them. But to murder people who might be their allies? To raze whole cities to the ground at random? It seemed personal somehow, angry. She was sure if she looked closely enough at the attacks on the D-97 colonies it would tell her something useful about their enemies, but she could not focus. She would start looking through the reports and her mind would slide away from her work, often to Naboo and her childhood. As a girl she’d imagined love and all its permutations, but never the loss that stalked it. 

A small, ugly part of her thought of all those newly made widows and orphans and was glad for the company. The whole world should grieve with her: it was wrong that anyone could continue while Anakin was dead. She was ashamed, of course, but she wasn’t surprised. She had known she was capable of great ugliness at 14, when she’d killed to defend her people and had slept easily despite it. Anakin had always loved her ruthlessness. He had loved all of her, and now he was gone.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“You’re what?” Padmé asked, her voice rising.

“I’m leaving in two days on a mission in the Expansion Region, I thought you’d want to know.”

Padmé once again found herself at a loss as to how to talk to Obi-Wan. He had come over twice in the three weeks since Anakin’s death, both times at her invitation. He remained as distant as Naboo’s moon: bright, perfect, and utterly untouchable. That alone was enough for her to know that he wasn’t coping.

“It has been less than a month, that’s not enough time for you to mourn,” she told him, gently.

“I’m fine, Padmé. And, more importantly, I’m needed.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, looking for her best line of attack. She stood abruptly and walked over to him, sliding out a comb from her hair that concealed a small knife. He watched her approach with the same blank look he had worn since he had returned without her husband by his side. It was an act—she _knew_ it was an act—and she could not let him go back to the front lines: a small hurt now could save him from something far worse later.

“Padmé,” he said, and caught her hand by her side.

“Why are you hiding like this?” she demanded. “I know you loved him.”

He looked away from her for a moment, then brought her hand—with the knife still clutched in it—up to place a kiss on the back of her knuckles.

“I have to go.”

He squeezed her hand once then turned and left, his movements as spare and graceful as they always were, as if he did not carry any grief at all.

“Well then, so will I,” she told the empty room, then set about organising exactly that.

It wasn’t hard to discover where Obi-Wan was to be sent: there had been a slow merging of Republic and Jedi procedure and resources during the war in general, and during the last six months in particular, which meant that she only had to talk to two undersecretaries to get the information she needed. Thankfully there was a small degree of political wrangling involved in the mission Obi-Wan had been sent on, enough for her to justify the presence of a Senator, especially one with her front line experience.

She hated going begging to Palpatine but, in the end, she’d only had to mention the tiny moon that was Obi-Wan’s destination before he had made a request to the Jedi Council for her to be part of the landing party. It had been comforting, actually, to be around someone who had so clearly been affected by Anakin’s death. Palaptine had seemed a little older and a little shorter in temper these last weeks and she felt a sudden stab of affection for her old ambassador. She had sometimes thought his interest in Anakin’s affairs was more meddlesome rather than caring, but no-one could deny he was grieving for his friend. 

Liet was a tiny moon in the Daragl system, right on the edge of Hutt space. For its thousand year history it had been too small and unimportant to even warrant a Senator in the Lower House, instead being represented by their trade partners, the Iliu. Now they had found themselves at the forefront of the war, as their moon was the last available refuelling stop before a hyperlane that skirted dangerously close to a dying sun before coming out near the Luket Sector, and the resource-rich planets in it that were the current source of much of the basic material needed for Republic weaponry. Said hyperlane had mostly been used by pirates for the last few centuries, as the slowly exploding star had made the journey difficult to say the least. Now, however, it was the only direct route to that sector available: all the others had fallen to Separatists years ago. 

The problem was that the Liet were very much done with being passed back and forth from the Separatists to the Republic as planets and moons and asteroid bases were lost and regained in this terrible war. They had sent a comm message to let the Senate know that they had destroyed the Separatist base on their moon themselves, but from now on they would remain neutral. The possibility of regaining safe access to the hyperlane was too good an opportunity to miss and Obi-Wan was being sent in the role of both negotiator and general, should the Separatists turn up to try to regain their loss. In other circumstances it would have been too risky to consider sending a Senator, but in a stroke of luck a central Separatist comms relay system had been taken down a mere 72 hours before, so they had a good chance of getting to Liet before the Separatists were even aware that their base was a base no longer.

Still, her reason for attending was flimsy: the Senate had long since given up sending representatives to every planet or people who were considering jumping ship. Additionally, every high-level planning session she had been to in the last four months had included a break-down of their remaining assets, which was basically a straight line at this point: it was impossible to assign relative value to something they had so little of. She reminded herself that every very planet, every hyperlane, every blaster was necessary if they had any chance of staying level with the Separatists, let alone winning. She therefore didn’t feel any guilt over choosing to follow Obi-Wan out into the field: wherever he was would be important enough that she could also do some good. 

Padmé listened to C-3PO’s overly detailed analysis of the Liet’s language with more attention than she usually would. They had a high degree of formality to their language that said a lot about them as a species. Even more interesting was the fact that it was grammatically impossible to state what someone else thought: you could say ‘I imagine you’re tired’ or ‘I think you might be angry’, but you couldn’t make a direct statement about someone else’s state of being. As far as the Liet were concerned, what you could not prove could not be given surety in their language, and to attempt to do so was equal to lying. 

“Obi-Wan misses Anakin,” she said to herself, and wondered at the idea that such a statement could not be expressed by the people she was heading towards.

  
  
  
  
  


The cafeteria smelt of sweat, gun oil and protein rations. Padmé was far too adept at hiding how she felt to let the roll of nausea she felt show on her face, but she did change her mind about eating and instead helped herself to a cup of the thick, gloopy caff that even the clones were avoiding. It wasn’t even so much that it was a terrible smell—she’d suffered through far worse—it was the associations: pounding through a corridor with Ani by her side and a battalion of clones behind them; sitting with him in the tiny mess on Twilight, his hand in hers while Rex and Appo pretended they couldn’t see them; Anakin’s implacable resolve when his clones were in danger, treating them with a respect she rarely saw from others. 

All his kindness, all his passion: gone now.

“Senator?” 

“Rex!” Padmé exclaimed, surprised to see the subject of her thoughts in front of her. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m with the 212nd. General Kenobi grabbed as many of us as he could when….” 

He stopped abruptly, and looked so uncomfortable that Padmé felt moved to reach over and grip his forearm, where he had taken off his armour to reveal the thick black undersuit all clones wore.

He offered her a sharp nod in response and Padmé let go of his arm, casting around for something to say. Anything that would stop him from offering condolences or asking how she was. As one of the few people who must have an idea of the depths of her feelings for Anakin, she found she couldn’t stand to hear him tell her how sorry he was. She was ashamed that he must know both truths: that she had loved Anakin, and that she could not mourn him in the way he deserved. 

“I’m glad to see you, if you don’t mind me saying so, Senator,” Rex continued, and Padmé silently blessed his discretion. “Between you and me, General Kenobi has been… well, not himself. Hopefully with you here he might be a little less reckless. There’s only so much poor Cody can take.”

“Reckless?” she asked, finding it hard to attach such an adjective to Obi-Wan. 

“Well,” Rex shifted, stepping back to let another clone get to the caff machine. “Let’s just say that he seems to have taken a leaf from General Skywalker’s guide to warfare.”

Padmé had gotten good at not flinching when Anakin’s name came up unexpectedly in conversation, and she gave nothing away now. 

_Senator Amidala and Commander Rex to the bridge_ , came the announcement over the shipwide system, interrupting any reply she might have made.

Padmé put down her empty cup and offered her arm to Rex with a small smile. He bowed slightly then placed his hand on her elbow and allowed her to escort him out of the cafeteria and to the bridge, where Obi-Wan and Commander Cody were waiting for them. 

“We are expecting an attack from Separatists at any time,” Obi-Wan began, without preamble. “The fact that they have not yet arrived is pure luck: both the interference from the dying star— _Penthos_ in the local language—and the loss of their comms relay in the South-East Sector will be hindering them significantly. 

“We will therefore need to act quickly: I will go down to the base to check that the droids haven’t left any nasty surprises. Rex, you are to take a squadron down to the surface as a reminder to the Liet that we are perfectly capable of protecting them. Cody, you are to stay here and direct the first assault should the Separatists decide to come see why they haven’t heard anything from their base in three rotations.”

Cody and Rex exchanged an uneasy glance as Obi-Wan turned away from them to Padmé.

“Senator, as you can see the situation on the moon has not yet been deemed safe,’ he continued. “So it would be best for you to stay here with Cody for the time being.”

“I disagree completely, General,” Padmé stated, in what Anakin had always referred to as her _take_ \- _no-shit_ voice. “The imminent threat of the arrival of a Separatist fleet only enhances my need to be present. I can begin negotiations while you make your sweep of the base.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Cody replied after a pause, maintaining eye-contact with her despite the look Obi-Wan sent his way. 

Obi-Wan regarded her for a moment longer then gave her a short bow.

“As you wish, Senator.”

He then turned on his heel and strode off the bridge, clones scrabbling to move out of his way. 

Rex blew out a breath once the door shut behind Obi-Wan. Padmé watched him go, then followed at a more sedate pace to prepare for whatever they would find on the surface.

As it was, the Liet had done an excellent job of rendering the Separatist base useless: there was barely anything left of it for Obi-Wan to check, so he joined her not long after she had begun speaking to Shuli, who was the most senior member of their government. Zir designation, according to C-3PO, translated to something like _most-honest-one_.

Obi-Wan skipped pleasantries and, holding his untouched drink in one hand, he launched into a detailed tactical analysis of the Liet’s remaining resources and the relative likelihood—low—of them being able to withstand another Separatist invasion.

“We will protect you from any further attacks,” he finished. “The Senate has agreed to leave two squadrons of clones along with a seasoned commander to protect you and your settlements.”

Padmé broke in before the Liet’s representative could reply.

“Forgive us, your Sincerest, but I feel that the dogmatism of Standard is doing us a disservice. There is no certainty in this life, but instead let us discuss facts: when you have been attacked by Separatist forces before, did the delay in the arrival of the Republic army mean that more of your people died, more of your cities were destroyed?”

“Yes, this is fact.”

“And did the dangers and the unpredictability of the closest hyperlane to Liet cause this delay?”

“Yes, this is also fact.”

“Would having two squadrons of clones—whom you are free to inspect yourself with whomever of your government that you wish—stationed on your planet negate these facts?”

The tall Liet regarded her for a moment from behind zir great faceplates.

“Yes, it would.”

She flicked Obi-Wan a look that she hoped adequately expressed her desire for him to keep his mouth shut, and waited for what she was sure would be the Liet’s agreement. Ze conferred with zir Council for an hour, but when ze returned it was with a formal agreement.

She and Obi-Wan stayed a little longer, long enough to be polite and to get the clones onto the surface and establish contact with the military arm of Liet’s government. Padmé was relieved to see that neither Rex nor Cody would be leading the squadrons they were leaving there. 

“The hyperlane was not the only reason for the delayed response, you know,” Obi-Wan told her as they made their way back up through the moon’s artificial atmosphere to their waiting ship. “We simply didn’t have enough resources to respond to them at the time.”

“I know,” Padmé replied.

“You lied.”

“We need that hyperlane, without it we may as well give up on the whole Luket Sector, from Idis to Tyr.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing,” he said, and from there the journey back up the ship was a silent one. 

She didn’t know why she did it. 

In Naboo culture disrespecting the privacy of another was taboo, and yet something made her walk on quiet feet into Obi-Wan’s bunk; made her step into the small space and flip back the top of Obi-Wan’s small travel bag, revealing the contents within. 

On the top was one of Anakin’s dark shirts, neatly folded. 

She put a hand on it and, feeling her tears already starting to fall, pulled it with her as she sat on the bunk. She had been sure of Obi-Wan’s love for Anakin, but to see this very real proof of his grief was both devastating and a relief. Devastating because, for all that they had grown apart since Naboo, he was still her friend, and a relief because now she had proof that she wasn’t alone.

The swish of the door opening some minutes later followed by the shift in air pressure let her know that Obi-Wan had entered his quarters, though his footfalls made no sound.

“Why?” she demanded, looking up at him. “Why can’t you show me you miss him? Why have you denied your own feelings?”

He sat down next to her and, with great care, took Anakin’s shirt from her and folded it, placing it back in his bag and flipping the top closed. 

“Because I cannot,” he told her. “Because there is no _time_. People are dying and there isn’t time for me to try to come to some sort of acceptance that Anakin is—”

He cut himself off abruptly and Padmé felt an upswell of guilt for making him admit even that much. It was pure selfishness on her part to demand he take her into his confidence when she had kept so much from him, when she knew he would have a reason for keeping her at arm’s length, even if it was a reason she couldn’t really understand.

“I’m sorry, I have always known this war asks too much of you, but I didn’t imagine this.”

“I know I have not been there for you as I should but I promise you, you are not alone in this.” Obi-Wan paused for a moment, his jaw tight. “He is my first thought when I wake and my last thought at night. He always has been.”

“I’m sorry I doubted you,” she told him.

“No, no, it is I who owes you an apology.”

Padmé was Force-blind, as most sentients were, and could not see the beauty of the interconnected structure of it that Anakin sometimes tried to describe to her, but she could almost sense the maelstrom of emotions that boiled just under the surface as Obi-Wan sat next to her, silently fighting for control.

“Do you think he lives on in other universes?” she asked into the quiet that had sprung up between them. “That there are places where Anakin Skywalker led a full life and died an old man?”

“Yes, I'm sure of it.”

“And he is remembered?”  
  


“In those universes, and there are many of them, people centuries down the line speak of him with awe. There are monuments to his greatness and the name Skywalker is not forgotten.”

Padmé smiled a little, though it hurt to do so.

“I think he would have really liked a monument.”

Obi-Wan made a sound that she could, if she was feeling generous, call a laugh.

“I think he would have really liked a castle and a cape,” he told her.

“Yes, not long after we first got together he told me he’d loved that terrible children’s show with the haunted castle and the little Twi’lek girl who always saved the day in her bright costume with her droid.”

“And you still married him?”

Padmé laughed then, but Obi-Wan only looked down at his hands, folded in his lap.

“I think he wanted you to know, he just couldn’t imagine telling you,” she reassured him.

Obi-Wan shook his head and straightened.

“If he didn’t feel able to tell me then the fault lies with me.”

Padmé opened her mouth to reply, but at that moment the proximity alarms sounded, instantly followed by loud footfalls in the corridors.

Obi-Wan’s comm flared into life, “ _General, a Separatist battleship has just come out of hyperspace. Approximately forty seconds until they are in range of our guns.”_

Obi-Wan replied, already up and out of the door with Padmé just behind him. 

It was quick, in the end. The Separatists had clearly not been expecting a Republic battleship to be waiting for them, and they’d emerged from hyperspace with their shields at only half-power and their broadside facing the _Vigilance_ ’s vast array of weapons.

“We are losing, aren’t we?” she asked, as she watched the debris from the Separatist ship drift in front of the viewport, the occasional flare of light showing where particularly large scraps were being destroyed by the Liet’s atmospheric defence system. It was the kind of sight that had become depressingly familiar to her.

“We won this one, Padmé,” Obi-Wan said, sounding surprised. “You convinced the Liet to stay on side and you are looking at the remains of at least two battalions of droids, not to mention their ship. That is something, isn’t it?”

“And how many planets and moons will be taken back by the Separatists the second we turn our backs? There are not enough of us and there are not enough of them to fight for the whole galaxy, so instead we trade back and forth, haemorrhaging lives and planets and perhaps our own morality as we do so. Is that winning?”

“Surely you are not suggesting we give in, not while knowing there is evil at the heart of their actions?”

“No, it’s just...I feel we never have time to stop and think. There must be some way to change the game.”

“I agree, and the Council has come to a similar conclusion. It is almost as if the war itself is the point.”

“The point of what?”

“I don’t know and, in all honesty, I’m a little afraid to find out.” 

The bustle of action continued around them and Padmé was grateful to Obi-Wan for allowing her to pretend that they had time to rest for a moment.

“He was not perfect, you know,” Padmé told him, thinking of loss and secrets and Anakin. Always Anakin.

“None of us are, Padmé,” Obi-Wan replied, following the winding thread of the conversation without pause. “The difference is that those of us who live have the chance to grow, to atone for our mistakes.”

“You sound as if you’re speaking about yourself. What do you have to atone for?”

“That I wasn’t with him, at the end.”

Padmé reached out and touched two fingers to the back of his hand—the only place from his neck down that wasn’t covered by his armour. 

He didn’t look at her, but nor did he move away. After a moment she let her hand drop and went back to watching the fires burn in the viewport, the destroyed battleship spinning slowly away from them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I'm going to fix the sad, okay? Okay.


	3. Part II

_You say you've gone away from me_

_But I can feel you when you breathe_

**Part II**

Anakin paced his tiny berth: three steps forward and three steps back. 

Once, on a planet whose name he’d forgotten, he and Obi-Wan had been stuck in a hot and dusty market, drinking endless cups of spiced tea while they waited for whatever they’d been waiting for. There had been a stall selling animals not far from where they sat and the fear of them in their cages had slowly seeped into Anakin’s consciousness until Obi-Wan had abruptly decided he had drunk his fill of tea and that they should walk for a while. Anakin had watched the dark-eyed creatures pace their cages as they’d passed and had wondered if that was the way the Council saw him sometimes: a wild thing, a thing full of fear and anger. Or maybe that was only how he saw himself.

He pulled his mind back to the present where he went over the facts once again. 

The voice he’d heard had been the Supreme Chancellor’s. It had been heavily distorted and he’d been using a code Anakin had yet to crack, but he’d known it was Palpatine with the same ice-cold surety that served him so well in battle. He remembered the sick lurch of recognition he’d felt; then disbelief; then horror at how badly he’d been betrayed—how badly he must have betrayed the Order. 

Then the endless questions began: how could he have not known? What twisted thing had the Chancellor seen in him that he’d sought him out, that had made him worm his way into Anakin’s confidence? What tricks could he have been made to perform by the Sith he had called friend? Anakin had been a slave for nine years: he knew what it was not to own your body, but the idea that perhaps Palpatine had done something to his mind was abhorrent. He was both desperate to be back at the Temple so he could be checked over by a Healer, and desperate not to have to tell the Council that he had been so easily fooled.

That was if they even believed him. He turned sharply—walking back and forth, back and forth.

Anakin of course hadn’t been able to make any kind of recording, and he’d left his comm with Yoda when he’d taken the mission, so he had no way of passing on what he knew, even if it had been safe to do so. The only thing he’d allowed himself to do when he left was to set off a subtle chain of minor malfunctions in the array’s shielding that would—eventually—lead to the array being short-circuited in one of the electrical storms that the continent was prone to. It had probably been foolish to damage the comms system in any way, but he found he couldn’t leave it functioning, not after discovering he’d probably been passing Jedi intel to a Sith for years. 

He sat down heavily on the narrow bed, his head hanging forward and staring at the grey flooring of the nondescript transport he’d caught, which were marked with the scuffs and marks of the tens if not hundreds of sentients who’d used this space at one time or another. 

He couldn’t imagine explaining this to Obi-Wan, who’d always been wary of Palpatine. Anakin had spent enough time in the Halls of Healing when he had first come to the Temple to understand that his need for praise and recognition wasn’t always a healthy need, but he’d thought himself better than this: stronger. Apparently he was just as weak as all the minds he had bent to his will with the Force over the years. 

He took a deliberate breath and let it out slowly, pushing it away from him and into the Force. It did nothing to lessen his horror, but he no longer felt the urge to pull the whole ship apart: to tear and rage. He knew he should at least attempt to meditate, but instead stared blankly ahead, itching at where the implants were slowly migrating over his cheekbones. They were high-grade biogel and were supposed to last for a year, but actually what that meant was that they wouldn’t degrade into a poison and enter your bloodstream and kill you for at least a year. They would, however, start to slowly move out of position after a standard month. Anakin had sworn about three days into his assignment that he was never going to wear the kriffing things ever again. 

That might not even be a consideration any more, he realised: perhaps there was a way to end the war once they had found some way to deal with Palpatine, to perhaps… He was too tired to even imagine what that would look like, or what place he would have in such a world. 

He was still tired when he arrived at the lower fifth landing docks on Coruscant, having only snatched a few hours of rest here and there in between the churning of his mind. He wanted nothing more than to go to Padmé’s rooms and sleep for a day, but even as he considered it—despite the danger of being seen—how could he rest knowing the rot that sat in the office only a few floors away? He took a transport car up to the second level, then climbed up an abandoned access shaft that he’d used a few times before to get to the Temple’s sector. 

Temple security had never been an issue for him and he surmised from the snatches of conversation he heard as he moved through the halls that Master Yoda was still off-world. In which case Master Windu was his next point of contact. 

As Anakin made his way towards Windu’s office he practised the coming conversation in his head, imagining all the ways he might be doubted and what he would say in the face of that doubt. Finally, once he was close, he conjured up the image of a tall castle: rising black and impenetrable from the rock. He would hold it fixed in his mind and make sure to show Windu no flicker of unease, no hesitation. The Council had often used his closeness with the Chancellor to their own ends, so they more than Anakin should have been aware of the danger. What had happened to him, the trust he had put in the Chancellor, it could have happened to anyone, he told himself, anyone at all.

  
  
  
  
  


Master Windu did not appear surprised to see him, nor did he seem surprised to learn that the Supreme Chancellor was a Sith Lord. Anakin was half tempted to tell him he was married, just to see if he could elicit some kind of reaction from him. Thankfully sanity won out and he was able to keep his mouth shut as Windu began the laborious task of contacting Yoda through the Temple’s secure comms network. It was a closed network that was only bounced through a few, highly shielded arrays deep in Republican space: much like the Separatist array that Anakin had gained access to. The Republican version could only be used in about half the galaxy now, as so many planets had gone over to Separatist rule, but Yoda was on Pradiet, just in reach of the relays. 

The second debrief was no less difficult than the first, and Anakin was tired and angry by the time he finished, even though this one highly was edited, as there was only so much sensitive information that could be given over a comm. When he’d agreed to this plan it had seemed a great honour: to be trusted to find the secret at the very heart of the Separatist movement; to be trusted to do something necessary and wholly without backup. But now he just wanted to see Padmé and Obi-Wan and, for some reason, that seemed to be a request too far for Yoda, who had been humming and hawing over the necessity of keeping his presence at the Temple a secret for nearly an hour.

“Master Yoda,” Anakin said. “Obi-Wan has been aware of this for over a month—I understand the need for me to stay hidden but, if he is on Coruscant as you say, I don’t understand why he can’t be brought here?”

There, that sounded reasonable. He very much hoped that Yoda was far enough away not to be able to read the annoyance in his voice. Windu gave him a look that suggested he wasn’t being as subtle as he thought he was.

Not for the first time, Anakin was grateful the thing attached to the bones of his wrist blocked not only his Force-signature, but also his emotions from those sensitive to pick up on them. He flexed his wrist back and forth, in a futile attempt to ease the ache in his arm.

“Difficult it— known— perhaps waiting—” 

The holovid flickered and then vanished in a burst of static.

“Master Yoda?” Windu said, but there was no reply. 

Anakin expected him to try to get Yoda back, but he surprised Anakin by instead asking the central comms team to request Obi-Wan’s presence in his office, immediately.

“I don’t think Master Yoda was agreeing with me,” Anakin couldn’t help but tell him.

“On this point, I am in disagreement with Master Yoda.”

Anakin wasn’t sure what could possibly be so contentious about him seeing Obi-Wan, but there was no way he was wading into any disagreement between Windu and Yoda. Windu had been insistent that the identity of the Sith was too sensitive to be broadcast over a commlink, even one as secure as those used by the Jedi, so Yoda was yet unaware of the enormity of Anakin’s discovery. He was due back on Coruscant in a few days though, so Anakin could look forward to having this same conversation all over again, only with added Yoda-levels of insight. 

“Do not answer the comm, do not touch anything and do not attempt to take that off,” Master Windu said, gesturing to his wrist. “There’s an adjoining room where you can wait. I will explain my decision to Master Yoda should he contact us again about this matter,” he added.

Anakin considered pointing out that it would be of the utmost stupidity to answer the comm when he was supposed to be dead, but decided against it. Windu inclined his head and spun on his heel, leaving Anakin to wait for Obi-Wan to arrive. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


His first thought when the door chimed to announce a visitor was that Obi-Wan had aged impossibly since the last time he’d seen him. He looked haggard and unwell: pale with dark circles around his eyes.

Obi-Wan stopped dead just inside the room and stared at Anakin. 

Suddenly he knew why Yoda had been so reluctant to allow this meeting: Obi-Wan hadn’t known he was alive. Then Obi-Wan strode towards him and pulled Anakin into his arms with a low, wounded sound. Anakin gripped the back of his robes, unable to imagine it. For all that he’d had the secret, selfish thought that it would be just to make Obi-Wan deal with what he had gone through when their positions had been reversed, in reality he never would have agreed to the mission if Yoda had not promised to pass on his message to Obi-Wan stating the basics of the plan.

“You knew,” he whispered, hating to see Obi-Wan so undone. “I thought you knew.”

Obi-Wan shuddered under his hands, almost all of his weight on Anakin. He moved his hand so it was gripping the back of Anakin’s neck and their Force-bond blazed into life at the contact. Anakin staggered under the weight of Obi-Wan’s grief: black and thick and suffocating. He closed his eyes, trying to control his breathing, to give back to Obi-Wan the knowledge that he was well and safe through their bond. It was a struggle not to be pulled under into the darkness of Obi-Wan’s emotions, not to reach out to meet them with his own doubts and fears.

When Obi-Wan finally pulled back it was only to a few inches, still close enough for their Force bond to remain strong between them. Anakin had missed their connection so much—he hadn’t realised how much until it was restored to him: bright and vibrant and alive.

“How?” Obi-Wan asked, and Anakin knew without explanation what he meant.

He held up his arm and let his robes fall back to display the thing that had stopped Obi-Wan getting even the vaguest sense of him in the Force. Obi-Wan wrapped his hand around his wrist, close to but not touching the oily metal of the Sith artefact.

“I’m sorry—” Anakin blurted, needing to say something, anything to try to end the pain he could feel pulsing through Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan pulled his head down until their foreheads touched.

“It’s okay,” he told Anakin, and Anakin could feel his conscious effort to calm himself. Gradually the Force settled between them, not balanced, but less wild. “I have to go find Padmé and bring her here, but I’ll be back shortly.”

Anakin jerked back, almost out of Obi-Wan’s grip.

“She thinks—?” Anakin couldn’t complete the thought. But of course, if Obi-Wan hadn’t known then there was no possible way for Padmé to have known. 

“Will you bring her here? I can’t leave: I’m still supposed to be dead.”

“Yes, and I’m looking forward to hearing an explanation for all this, but in the meanwhile, I will go find her.” 

Obi-Wan gave his shoulder one last squeeze then turned and left the room. Anakin was glad he hadn’t had to convince him of the urgency of letting Padmé know he was alive, but he couldn’t settle despite knowing that Obi-Wan would be as good as his word and go to her straight away.

As it was they were back within the hour. Padmé let out a cry as soon as she saw him and flew into his arms. He pulled her tight against his chest, fighting against his own tears as she sobbed. 

She hit his shoulder weakly.

“How could you?” she whispered.

“I thought you knew,” he told her, resting his cheek on her hair. “I gave a letter to Master Yoda to pass onto Obi-Wan, with a note for you inside. I would have never put you through this Padmé, never.” 

She pulled away a little to look up at him, her makeup streaked down her face and her skin blotchy and red from crying. She was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

She wiped at her tears. “Obi-Wan,” she said, and Anakin almost jerked back from her when he remembered that Obi-Wan was in the room. “Come sit here with Anakin, I’m going to wash my face.”

She clasped Obi-Wan’s hand as she walked past him to the adjoining fresher and they shared a look Anakin couldn’t interpret. He thought for one wild moment that something had happened between them, then dismissed it.

“We better do as she says,” Obi-Wan commented to him, but instead went and poured himself a cup of strong-smelling tea from one of the urns that graced most rooms in the Temple.

Padmé came back within a minute, frowning at Obi-Wan who was still fussing with his cup and Anakin who was standing in the middle of the room, at a loss. Anakin hastily took a step backwards and sat down on a low sofa opposite Windu’s desk.

“Obi-Wan,” she said, looking at him expectantly as she settled herself next to Anakin, taking his artificial hand in hers. 

Obi-Wan sat down next to Anakin—close, but not touching—which didn’t seem to please Padmé at all. She looked at him narrowly while he sipped his tea. 

Anakin took a breath to ask what the kriff was going on, but Padmé beat him to it.

“Tell us,” she demanded, and Anakin began to explain as best he could. 

  
  
  
  


One of the Council’s informants _had_ been spaced by a pirate crew out in the Dolos Sector, and Anakin had been on that ship. In the chaos that followed as the Jedi and had tried to reach their contact who, at that time, was slowly suffocating to death, another Jedi on the other side of the galaxy had come across a stash of long-lost Sith artefacts and had come up with a plan that even Anakin thought was a little on the risky side. 

Anakin, still on the pirate ship, had been trying to find out where they met their Separatist contact, but had decided to stop sneaking through the ship’s navigation tags when the captain had murdered a third of her crew on the basis of a rumour. 

Both said Jedi and Yoda had been waiting with him at the rendezvous point with a black core-iron box with a particularly ugly bit of jewellery inside; a contact in yet another group of murderous scum; and a very flimsy plan. Anakin, of course, had said yes, but only on the condition that a letter he wrote to Obi-Wan would be passed to him before he was officially announced as dead.

Whatever magic their contact had worked had been good: no-one had blinked when Anakin turned up to help shoot womp-rats at the ass-end of the galaxy, trying to stop the damn things from chewing their way through the relays that the Separatists relied on for their communications in that sector. After a week, in which he’d managed to fix nine relays—in addition to building an organic disrupter that stopped anything trying to chew the wiring whilst also not blocking any of the signal—he’d been promoted, although he hadn’t realised that it was a promotion at the time. It was half a galaxy away, where nothing tried to eat the systems but electrical storms occasionally fried half the conducting units. His co-workers were mostly Koorivar and Voon, who avoided each other but would nod at Anakin with something like respect after the first fifty or so times he’d painstakingly unglued a conducting unit from its casing.

Another two weeks and Anakin had found himself frozen in disbelief as he’d heard Palpatine—who encouraged him, who put a gentle hand on his shoulder whenever he saw him, who always, _always_ made time for him—Palpatine’s voice, encoded and using a cipher, speaking to a respectful Dooku. Anakin had felt the Force shift beneath his feet with the depth of the revelation, as the world inexorably re-oriented itself around this new fact: Palpatine was a traitor, and then, Palpatine was the elusive Sith the Council had been searching for. 

“Palpatine?” Padmé said, utter disbelief colouring her words. 

Obi-Wan merely sat back, absorbing the truth Anakin had presented him and allowing the pieces to fall into place: Dooku, the war, the slow trickle of information that had caused so many deaths, the futility of everything they had fought for…

No, Anakin realised, Obi-Wan wouldn’t let himself see it like that: there was always an answer for him, always hope. 

“But Palpatine,” Padmé continued. “He’s—”

“A Sith,” Obi-Wan finished, and he glanced at Anakin, who looked back at him with a question in his mind. 

Despite the thing around his wrist suppressing their Force bond, Obi-Wan read him as well as he always did. He frowned, as if the mere idea that Anakin was somehow responsible for not noticing the Sith in their midst had never occurred to him. Anakin looked away, relieved, and for a moment the Obi-Wan was a bright line of contact along his side as he leaned into him.

“But the war!” Padmé exclaimed, her voice rising as she got to her feet. “The loss, it’s all been for nothing!” 

“No, not for nothing,” Obi-Wan told her. “To bring us to this point, to the very point where he thinks he has fooled us, when he thinks he has all but won. Now, he is at his most vulnerable. All those lives, they have brought us here so we can prevent a greater loss.”

Anakin looked at him, and found strength in his belief: that he could see a way through even as he struggled with his own shock.

“What will you do?” she asked Anakin.

“I don’t know. Master Yoda has recalled the Council to Coruscant under the pretence of discussing how they can bridge the gap in their ranks after my loss. I know I’ll have to stay hidden: Palpatine can’t know I’m alive.” 

“Do you know why Master Yoda didn’t pass on your letters?” Padmé asked him, sitting back down.

Anakin shrugged. “Perhaps he thought it would be more believable if Obi-Wan didn’t know the truth.”

“Maybe he thought you could cope,” Padmé suggested to Obi-Wan, which Anakin nearly snorted at. Of course Obi-Wan would have coped with the loss of Anakin: he would have rejoiced at the joining of Anakin with the Force as all good Jedi should. Obi-Wan had gone tense beside him though, so he kept his thoughts to himself. It didn’t matter anyway: he was alive and was trying not to think of Ashoka and Rex and everyone who must still think he was dead. 

“Did Master Yoda give you permission to tell us that you were alive?” Obi-Wan asked, doubtfully.

“Well, not in so many words,” Anakin admitted. “But Master Windu contacted you, so if Yoda asks we’re blaming him.”

Obi-Wan made a considering noise and Anakin was angry at himself all over again for allowing this: his friendship with Palpatine and his failure to make sure the people he loved were aware of his mission and the black metal that prevented him from feeling the bright thread of humour he was sure ran from Obi-Wan into the Force right now. Obi-Wan, whose understanding of Anakin was apparently undimmed, took his arm and turned it carefully, allowing Anakin’s sleeves to fall back and reveal the band that was effectively keeping him invisible in the Force. 

Padmé gasped. “Oh Ani…”

It was ugly: the metal had an oily sheen to it, and two thin bars extended from one side to the other, piercing Anakin’s flesh and scoring the bone in between. It didn’t prevent him from moving his hand or arm, but the wound was a deep, never-healing ache.

“Where in the galaxy did you ever find this? And who thought it was a good idea to put it on you?” Obi-Wan asked. With his hand on his skin Anakin could feel their bond again, the ragged edges in Obi-Wan’s Force signature soothed to softness again by Anakin’s presence. Anakin had to repeat the question to himself, shocked once more to feel the disorder of Obi-Wan’s mind.

“It was Master Vos’ idea,” he answered, before thinking about what he was saying and winced as Obi-Wan’s hand tightened around his wrist.

“Quin knew you were alive?” he asked.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that he was aware that you didn’t,” Padmé said, looking intently at Obi-Wan, who took his hand away from Anakin’s wrist, rendering his emotions once again invisible to Anakin. 

“Of course,” Obi-Wan agreed, but his voice was chilly and distant. 

“He thought you’d get the letter,” Anakin told him. 

It was a lie, but only in that Vos hadn’t explicitly said anything about Obi-Wan. Anakin knew Vos and Obi-Wan were friends, and he was sure that he’d never purposefully keep something like this from him. 

Obi-Wan accepted that with a nod, but without their Force-bond Anakin had no way of knowing if his lie had comforted him or not. They left soon after, and Anakin wondered if he was capable of anything other than making everything worse.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He now knew how it felt to be dead: really kriffing boring. Anakin was about to die of boredom which would be the height of irony, now that he thought about it. 

He’d managed to spend the first two days using his excellent memory to go over every interaction with Palpatine with a fine-toothed comb, trying to see if he had somehow gotten to Anakin, had somehow changed his thinking or planted some belief or idea there. He wanted to believe that his anger, his inability to be the kind of person those around him expected him to be, was some poison planted by the Sith but he could admit, at least to himself, that that was a character defect all of his own. 

Then he got the added delight of doing exactly the same thing with Master Windu and a temple Healer, as it had apparently occurred to someone in the Council that his close relationship with Palpatine might be cause for concern. He’d been signed off by the healer as being trigger free, but he couldn’t help but poke at the dark recesses of his mind, looking for a charge that might trip a bomb or a massacre or a terrible betrayal. 

It didn’t help that, aside from the tender mercies of Master Windu, he’d been alone. Neither Obi-Wan nor Padmé had been back since that first day, and he couldn’t exactly comm them. In fact, he’d idly poked at the comms array in the corner of the room he’d been assigned on his second day, only to find the whole thing had been disconnected from even an emergency power source. After taking it to pieces he’d stared longingly at his lightsaber, wondering if he could use the khyber crystal as a power source without blowing them all up or Master Windu noticing—both outcomes being about equally awful.

On the fifth day, he jerked out of a light doze at the sound of the door to find Obi-Wan and Padmé back again. 

Padmé hugged and kissed him and Obi-Wan gripped his shoulder for a moment before going over to the sofa to sit.

“I’m sorry,” Padmé told him. “It’s been almost impossible to get in unnoticed.” 

There was an air of expectancy about them both, almost excitement and for a moment Anakin let himself get carried away with the thought that it was already done: that Palpatine was dead and Anakin wouldn’t have to face the man who had pretended to be his friend. 

“I’ve had an idea-” Padmé started, glancing at Obi-Wan before continuing. Anakin wondered for a crazed moment if she was going to propose a threesome “-and I know it will seem cowardly, or a betrayal, but I ask that you hear me out.”

Anakin blinked, bringing himself back to reality.

“I—we—,” Padmé stopped to take his hand in hers, then started again. “It was hard without you here, harder than I have words to express, but what made it harder was that your apparent death had made no difference: not to the war. It continued, inexorable and terrible and pointless. I lost my faith in the Jedi the day you died, and having you restored to me has not restored my faith. The Jedi will have to face Palpatine and it will be terrible and deadly and I don’t want any part in it. We should go somewhere far away where we will be safe; where, if the worst happens, we will be best placed to provide a fall-back, a second front. I know it sounds like running away, but please, please think about it.”

Anakin unlaced his fingers from Padmé’s and pulled his hand back into his lap, feeling sick. He didn’t know what he’d imagined the response to his supposed death, to the revelations about Palpatine would be, but he hadn’t expected this.

“I can’t leave the 501st, I’ve already spent enough time away from them,” he said, blurting the first excuse that came to mind.

“If it all goes wrong then they will be coming to us,” Obi-Wan assured him. “By doing this we would be providing them with a possibility of retreat, one they might not otherwise have, or might not otherwise be given to them.”

It was somehow worse to hear Obi-Wan say it, to know that he was prepared to run.

“And you would give this all up?” he demanded, standing, needing to be moving. He wanted to walk out of this room, out of the Temple and back to the front lines, where at least he knew what he was supposed to do. “Everything you’ve worked for to run to some dark corner of the galaxy and hide?”

“You’re not listening to us,” Padmé replied, getting abruptly to her feet. “ _There is no light here_! Not any more. It’s all been corrupted and we are caught in this terrible war, doing nothing but allowing its spread. We _must_ leave and make something better, something strong so that when or if Palpatine retaliates, we will be ready to fight. I no longer believe in the absolute power of the Jedi. They are fallible and we were wrong to put so much weight on their shoulders. I will not wait for the Jedi to save us this time, we must save ourselves.”

“Master?” Anakin asked. “You think moving against Palpatine would be hopeless?”

Obi-Wan looked at him with all of his focus and, for all that Anakin couldn’t feel him in the Force, it was still a heavy weight to bear and Anakin had to fight not to fidget.

“Not hopeless, but I do not believe there is enough guarantee of success to risk so much on it,” he said, and Anakin sat down heavily on the chair behind him.

They would be abandoning the Council, the clones: his men, to the most powerful Sith in a hundred generations. 

“Why?” Anakin asked, unable to imagine Obi-Wan ever contemplating such a plan.

“When you were gone….” he started, then uncharacteristically stopped without finishing his thought. He shook his head and started again, “We risked everything on this war: our lives, our reputation, perhaps the very Order itself, and we have been wrong. Here, in the middle of all this death, how can we say we can see clearly enough to say we’re right this time? A second front, a place to fall back to, a place to think and plan. It’s a good idea, and one that perhaps the Council might agree to.”

“You plan to ask the Council if you, me, who is supposed to be dead, my Force cloaking device—itself a Sith artefact—and Padmé can run to the other side of the galaxy together just in case they try to take down Palpatine and he somehow wins.” 

“Well, I wasn’t planning on phrasing it like that.”

Anakin got up and paced across the room before turning back to them. He didn’t know how he felt, other than overwhelmed. His duty to the Order, to all Obi-Wan had sacrificed to keep him on the Jedi path, to his men who had fought by his side for so long—his duty warred with the idea that somehow _he_ was the reason Obi-Wan and Padmé were suggesting leaving all they’d known behind, that the imagined loss of him had driven them to this decision. It should have felt exultant, to have the people he loved show that they held him in such high regard: above their cause, above their values. 

For the first time since he was a boy he wanted to find a small, safe place to sit. To be quiet and still in a way he couldn't stand any more, because it reminded him of the type of comfort he’d sought when he’d been a slave. 

“I never took you for a coward,” he spat at Obi-Wan, not knowing what else to say, how to express the terrible conflict he felt. 

“Anakin!” Padmé gasped.

He was glad Obi-Wan had no way of sensing his turmoil. He looked away, to the calm blue of the walls that he’d been staring at for the last five days.

“I’m sorry,” he told Obi-Wan, though he wasn’t sure if it was true or not.

“I know this is a shock,” Obi-Wan told him, calm and remote, the bond between them just as untouchable as it had been for the last month. “Come, sit Anakin. I don’t need to sense you in the Force to see that you have worked yourself up over this. Sit and listen to us. Please.”

Anakin sat.

  
  
  
  
  


Obi-Wan still wouldn’t look at Anakin, and Anakin hadn’t found a way to apologise. Padmé seemed to be making up for his lack of eye-contact with Obi-Wan by staring angrily at the side of his head. He evidently needed to apologise to her as well.

By agreement, it was Padmé who explained. Obi-Wan had argued hard for it to be him, as a member of the Council, who put their idea of a second front to Master Windu and Master Yoda, but Padmé had been resolute. 

Master Yoda, who was so recently arrived from the front lines that the Force still shimmered around him with narrowly-missed death, made his way slowly to the centre of the room where Padmé stood, flanked by Anakin and Obi-Wan. Even someone Force blind would be able to feel the determination coming from her but, even now, Anakin didn’t know if he wanted them to agree with her or not. It was all twisted up inside him: his love for Padmé and Obi-Wan, his loyalty to his men and the Order, and the knowledge of Palpatine as Sith staining all his thoughts with doubt.

“Senator Amidala, pleased to see you I am, but unsure how past security you got.”

Everyone in the room looked at Obi-Wan without actually looking at him, and Anakin cleared his throat, prepared to pull attention away from his old Master.

“It is a mystery, Master Yoda,” Obi-Wan said, and Anakin instinctively tensed at the anger he could hear in his voice. “As much a mystery as the letter Anakin wrote addressed to me.”

Yoda nodded. “No mystery that is, here the letter is,” and he pulled Anakin’s letter from a pocket and held it up for Obi-Wan, who, after a moment, took it and held it carefully between his hands.

“Sorry I am, for the pain I caused you,” Yoda continued. “Bear it, I thought you could. But now I see that wrong I was. Perhaps if only your own pain it had been, but watched another you care for suffer, you did. Too much for anyone that would be.”

Anakin desperately wanted to reach out for his connection with Obi-Wan, but the terrible thing on his wrist prevented it and he would not tolerate Anakin’s touch in front of two other Masters. Perhaps not even if they were alone.

Obi-Wan looked down at the letter in his hands for a moment longer.

“Thank you,” he said, his face a mask of calm.

“We should sit,” Padmé suggested into the quiet that fell between them, so they arranged themselves on the low couches in the main part of the room.

“Why did you call this meeting, Senator?” Master Windu asked, and Padmé sat forward in her chair to explain.

When she had finished, Master Windu shared an unreadable look with Yoda.

“And you are aware of who this Sith is, Senator Amidala?” Master Windu confirmed.

“Yes.”

“And important to share this with you, it was? For you to know Master Skywalker lived?” Yoda enquired, mild as always. 

“It was necessary,” Padmé told him. 

“I see,” Yoda replied, and Anakin thought with a certain amount of hysteria that perhaps he did. 

“Where would you go?” Master Windu asked, with every appearance of taking them seriously. 

“We had not gotten that far in our planning,” Padmé admitted.

Windu nodded. “There is a planet out in the outer rim that would be suitable. It’s suffused with the Force to such a degree that you would be virtually undetectable, even without the artefact you wear, Skywalker.”

“Then you support this proposition?” Obi-Wan asked.

“I cannot and will not abandon the Jedi, nor will I fall to despair. That is not our way,” Windu replied. “But I see a little of the path you speak of, Senator Amidala. I will support your idea of a second front.”

They, as one, turned to Master Yoda. 

“Not enough of us there are to split apart, too few Jedi remain and all will be needed. What I think, this is. But Master Windu has been clearer of vision than I these past few months: saw the harm we had done to Master Kenobi, he did. 

“Agree I do not, but follow him in this I will. Master Kenobi, Master Skywalker: go to Dagobeh—undetectable in the Force you will be. And a last defence, should all else fail.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://xpityx.tumblr.com) for fandom and anarchy, but if you're just looking for writing updates then I use my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/xpityxfanfic) for those.


	4. Part III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **UN-BETA'D** \- it will be beta'd by the end of the week so if you want to come back when it has less em-dashes (and possibly makes more sense) then please feel free to do that ^^

_I have begun to long for you_

_I who have no greed_

_I have begun to ask for you_

_I who have no need_

**Part III**

  
  
  


Padmé had given every appearance of listening carefully as they’d explained why she could not tell any of her staff, that it could only be the three of them, then turned up promptly at the agreed meeting time with Moté in tow. 

“I honestly don’t know what you expected,” Obi-Wan said to Anakin, a hand clasped on his shoulder, while Anakin looked on to where Moté was bidding Padmé a tearful goodbye.

“Well, shall we?” Padmé asked once she was within speaking distance. She wiped briskly at her eyes and Obi-Wan made the tactical decision not to mention their agreement to tell no-one else.

They walked up the ramp to the ship they were borrowing from Coruscant’s Planetary Defence Force and Obi-Wan wondered if Master Yoda had agreed to them taking off in private precisely so he wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that they were taking Padmé with them.

“You could have at least told me you weren’t listening to me,” Anakin was complaining to Padmé.

“I did listen, I just disagreed. Moté has known my every move since I was 14 years old. You’re lucky I’m not bringing her with me.”

“You should take your wife’s former position as Queen of Naboo into consideration, Anakin,” Obi-Wan told him and Anakin tripped, barely catching himself on the wall of the corridor, then turned and gaped at him in surprise. 

Obi-Wan felt his mouth twitch into a smile at finally getting to use his knowledge of Anakin’s marriage. He’d been waiting days for the right moment.

He patted Anakin on the shoulder as he passed him, bracing himself for the shock as their Force-bond reignited at the contact. He would be relieved to be on Dagobah, where they had decided it would be safe for Anakin to remove the cursed thing he wore. He was glad in a way that he hadn’t had a chance to speak to Quin before they left, he knew without a doubt that Quin would never have let Anakin wear it if he hadn’t been sure it was safe for him to do so, but he couldn’t help his anger. He felt as if the Council, the Jedi as a whole, had taken Anakin away from him, if only for a brief time.

He was having difficulty forgiving them for it.

The ship was a partially reconditioned V-Class freight haulier and appeared about as safe as venturing out into space on a tauntaun. Everywhere he looked there were exposed pipes and wiring with cords of sealant as fine as spider webs strung between them. It was very unlikely to be noted as missing though and, as tightly intertwined as the Senate and the Jedi were these days, they had decided that to take one of the Jedi craft would be a trail they’d rather do without. 

There was a central room with six bunks lining each wall for a crew, and two further cabins to either side: one spacious and one rather cramped. Obi-Wan had already put his travel bag in the smaller one, and it was there that he retreated to now. 

His brief flash of humour was gone, and the blackness of loss crowded back into his mind. Even hearing Anakin’s low voice as he conversed with Padmé somewhere close by did nothing to stem it: he had heard Anakin’s voice in his head almost constantly when he’d thought him dead and, without their bond to prove otherwise, his mind stubbornly clung to his undealt-with grief.

“Hey—” Anakin started to say from behind him, and Obi-Wan startled.

“Are we ready?” he asked when Anakin didn’t go on. “We have only a few minutes until our window of opportunity.”

“Yes, I was just going to say that,” Anakin said, clearly lying, but Obi-Wan didn’t want to hear whatever he had come to say about his marriage, so he let it be. 

“Let’s get on with it then.”

Anakin simply leant back instead of stepping out of the way, necessitating Obi-Wan to brush past him in the narrow space in order to get into the corridor. Anakin caught his wrist as he moved past him, his regret and guilt a bright flare of Force between them.

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Obi-Wan asked, curious as to if Anakin could name his transgression.

“I—It was me who drank the last of your green leaf tea that time, not Cody.”

Obi-Wan smiled and turned his hand within Anakin’s grip so they were briefly palm to palm.

“I forgive you,” he told him, then let go and continued out into the corridor. 

  
  
  
  
  


The timing of their escape was precise by necessity: there could be no record of the ship that two Jedi—one of whom was supposed to be dead—and a Senator had disappeared on. Their second front was only a viable plan for as long as it remained secret. The Council had a ready excuse for when Obi-Wan’s absence was noticed, and Padmé had informed them she had made similar arrangements with her most trusted staff. Any excuse wouldn’t hold for long but it shouldn’t have to: the Council would not wait long to move against Palpatine.

Their plan hinged on the flight formations of the Defence Force, which were second-to-none when it came to protecting Coruscant from unauthorised ship entries, but had a few exploitable weaknesses when going from surface to space. One such weakness was the weekly removal of orbiting space debris to a holding unit close to Centax 2, one of Coruscant’s four moons, and one of two uninhabited ones. The warehouse used for debris that had gotten too close to the planet—but would cause too much disruption to destroy with surface guns—was only a few feet from the disused dock they were currently in. A ship, even one as big as a freight-haulier, would not be remarked upon as long as it was on the manifest. And Anakin had assured everyone it was because he’d put it there 24 hours ago. 

Once at Centax 2 it would be simple enough to wait until they were darkside and slip off into the nearest hyperlane. Lifeform scans were only carried out on the day of a ship’s destruction, so they should remain undetected as long as the ship appeared dead.

It was a little risky, but it was all they had been able to come up with in such a short time. The Council had initially wanted to send them to Dagobah with an escort, but Anakin had been quick to shoot down that idea. It didn’t matter how much faith they wished to put in each other: the truth of the matter was that the Order, all of them, had been deceived, and if they wanted this plan to have any real meaning, then it would be better if they left Anakin and Obi-Wan to make their own plans. The Council had reluctantly agreed, and now here they were, in a stolen ship, about to launch into weightless freefall and hope for the best. 

“Life support disengaged,” Anakin said and Obi-Wan automatically checked the air supply of his suit. “Hitting re-entry thrusters in five, four, three, two, one—”

Obi-Wan tugged on the tendrils of Force energy surrounding himself, Anakin and Padmé, using them to counteract the sudden movement as they blasted forward, out of the dock and towards the few ships and large pieces of debris that had just started their slow journey out towards Centax 2. Using the thrusters was a terrible idea in theory: they were almost impossible to direct effectively and likely to burn up the ship if used for too long in-atmosphere, but they wouldn’t leave behind the kind of energy signature that actual flight would and, if anyone could use them to get them where they needed to go, it was Anakin. 

For a moment Obi-Wan worried they’d overshot, but the rapidly approaching space trash slowed in their viewport until they were spinning gently in time with everything else. Finally, Anakin turned off the emergency power, and they were dropped into darkness.

“Well done,” Obi-Wan told Anakin, quietly.

“Why are you whispering?” Padmé half-laughed.

“I don’t think they can hear us, Master,” Anakin chimed in. “It’s a ship: the walls are pretty thick.” 

Obi-Wan scowled at them both as best he could from inside his helmet, which he suspected was not very well at all. 

“Well I’m pleased you’re both so certain we will be undetected, but I would rather err on the side of caution.”

“I guess that means you’re going to meditate then?”

Obi-Wan stood with as much dignity as his bulky suit would allow him. 

“I’ll be in my quarters if anyone needs me.” 

“Don’t think too loud!” Anakin called after him.

Obi-Wan huffed softly to himself, thinking that Anakin would feel his amusement regardless, then remembered that he couldn’t—that he was as alone with his thoughts as he had been when Anakin had been dead. 

He needed to grieve. Never mind that the subject of his grief was sitting on the bridge with his wife—he needed to process the terrible loss he had felt; he needed to cry; to let go. The only problem was that, while Anakin still wore the Sith artefact, Obi-Wan couldn’t convince his subconscious that Anakin was alive unless he was sitting right next to him, unless he had him under his hands.

He sat with less grace than usual in the heavy suit on the floor of his cabin: he was wearing it less for breathing—it would take upwards of eight hours for oxygen levels to run low on the ship—and more because of the cold. Perhaps he and Padmé would have borne it, but Anakin hated to be cold, so when Padmé had suggested they wear the suits while all power was off Obi-Wan had quickly agreed. 

Despite his efforts to clear his mind, all he could think of was Anakin’s assertion that he was a coward for even considering the plan they were now carrying out. It was true that he could not untangle his reasons for agreeing with Padmé. Anakin safe and alive was integral to his being: that was a simple truth he had known for long before it had been proved to him with Anakin’s apparent death. 

So, perhaps Anakin was right and he was a coward. It was a title he found he could bear, even gladly, to have Anakin restored to him. _Peace stems from acceptance_ , an old Jedi adage, and Obi-Wan breathed deeply and closed his eyes. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He fell out of sleep as quickly as blinking. When he’d been younger he’d woken up slowly, but the war had changed that. Anakin was sitting on the edge of his bed, wearing only a loose pair of sleep pants, despite the relative cold of the ship’s night. They’d made the jump to hyperspace only a few hours ago and Obi-Wan had been glad to be able to take off his suit once all main systems had been restored, although the ship was still warming up again.

“What is it?” he asked, quietly, wary of upsetting Anakin further if he’d had a nightmare or an argument with Padmé.

Anakin stayed where he was, shoulders tense and Obi-wan sighed as quietly as he could. This was much harder without their bond to fall back on. He hesitated for a moment more before going with the riskiest option and flicking back the covers in invitation. Anakin instantly lay back as if that had been exactly what he’d been waiting for, tucking the covers around him and crowding into Obi-Wan’s space in the narrow bunk. 

“Ow, move your knee,” he muttered, as if he had a right to be ordering Obi-Wan around in his own bed.

Obi-Wan moved his knee back into the four millimetres of space behind him and Anakin shoved his ridiculously long legs further under the covers.

He couldn’t help the wave of relief he felt—so strong that there was no way Anakin would be able to miss it—of having Anakin alive in the Force again. Obi-Wan wrapped an arm around Anakin’s chest and gripped his wrist, just above where the hateful bracelet sat.

“I will be glad when this is gone,” he admitted.

“Me too,” Anakin agreed. 

“Did Padmé kick you out?” 

“What? No!” Obi-Wan could feel Anakin flick through his emotions like a child might flick through a book: quick and unsettled. “She said I should come check on you.”

Obi-Wan raised his eyebrows. It was too dark for Anakin to see his expression, but he would be able to feel his surprise. 

“I’m fine,” he told Anakin, who snorted.

“No you’re not, and neither am I. How about we try and go a minute without pretending?”

“You want to talk about your feelings?” Obi-Wan asked, incredulously.

“I didn’t say that,” Anakin all but snapped.

“Ah, well-” Obi-Wan turned a little onto his back, getting comfortable in the narrow space between Anakin’s rigid intractability and the wall- “let’s not go too far off the beaten path, shall we?”

He settled as well as he could with another person in what was very definitely a single bunk, closing his eyes and hoping he would be able to slip into sleep again. He hadn’t slept well when Anakin had been dead.

“Were you really not okay?” Anakin asked and Obi-Wan opened his eyes and resisted the urge to sigh. Apparently they were discussing their feelings after all. 

“Anakin—” he started, then immediately words failed him. 

How to explain his many failures? They had made it this far without acknowledging all the ways Obi-Wan had failed as a Master, as a Jedi. It seemed redundant to start now, at what might possibly be the end of all they’d ever known. 

“It’s okay,” Anakin told him. “You don’t have to tell me.”

A fierce curiosity wound through their bond which somewhat undermined Anakin’s attempt at giving Obi-Wan some privacy.

“What did Padmé tell you?” 

“She thought you’d last another six months, at most, before you committed suicide by enemy fire,” Anakin said, bluntly.

“She overestimated me.”

Anakin rolled up onto his side, facing Obi-Wan.

“No,” he insisted.

Obi-Wan put his hand over where Anakin had placed his, over his heart.

“It doesn’t matter now, does it? You are alive and, moreover, you may have found a way to end the war.”

“You have to promise me you’ll go on if I die,” Anakin told him, determination a golden thread strung between them.

“No,” Obi-Wan said, simply. 

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“I mean exactly that: I have to do no such thing. I already tried it your way, and I have no plans to do so again.”

“Obi-Wan—” Anakin started but fell silent when Obi-Wan turned on his side so they were facing each other, linking their hands between them.

“Shall I ask the same of you?”

Anakin looked away at a point somewhere over Obi-Wan’s shoulder.

“Let’s sleep,” he suggested and Obi-Wan smiled without humour, not sure if he was relieved or not that their aborted attempt at naming what lay between them was already at an end. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Secrecy came at the price of speed, meaning they had to come out of hyperspace to change lanes more often than Obi-Wan liked. 

“Remind me again why we can’t use the old V’dor lanes?” he asked, sitting behind Anakin and Padmé, who were flying the ship and staring at a local star map, respectively. 

“Because-” Anakin said, reaching out to flick off a proximity alarm as he did so- “they have a bounty on both our heads.”

“Are you planning on being stopped?”

“No, but since when does anything we do go to plan?”

“Gentlemen,” Padmé interrupted. “Could we safely navigate this asteroid belt first, and bicker later?”

“It’s fine,” Anakin replied, just as the rear and aft proximity alarms began to wail in unison. 

He rolled the freighter in a way it was absolutely not meant to be rolled and Obi-Wan gripped the edge of his seat hard. He could not stop automatically reaching for Anakin through their bond, a wordless expression of support as he navigated the unexpected obstacle that had greeted them when they’d dropped out of hyperspace. Only blankness greeted him in the Force each time, and he gripped the seat harder. 

The war had started to affect space itself: the debris from a battleship was enough to subtly change the trajectory of an orbiting body when caught by the gravity of a planet or moon. This in turn was having small but significant effects on documented space phenomena that had remained stable for years: asteroids, solar winds, even hyperspace lanes were all starting to be affected, making the star map that Padmé was studying a mere hopeful guide to what they might find at any given moment. 

“I think this is the remains of S865X, a moon that belonged to the Furia System.”

“Furia, Furia,” Obi-Wan mused as they lurched to an almost-complete stop and Anakin swore viciously. “Didn’t the remains of a Republican battlecruiser crash into it?”

“No,” Padmé replied, still studying the map. “That was _Sephate_ , a planet in the Furi _o_ Sector on the other side of the galaxy. Separatists blew up S865X.”

“They blew it up? Whatever for?”

“Does it really matter?” Anakin demanded, as the freighter shuddered around them. “Just find us a way out of here.”

“Well I’ve already made my suggestion,” Obi-Wan told him. 

Anakin took a breath, undoubtedly to say something unflattering but Padmé cut him off.

“Look! Here!”

She flicked out the map with both hands, the stars becoming planets and the thin blue lines becoming the steady pulse of a stable hyperlane. 

“That’s a Separatist-held lane,” Obi-Wan told her.

“And we are flying a stolen smuggling ship, are we not? They will hardly notice among all the traffic this sector has: it’s one of the main lanes between Mid-Rim and the Core. Also, it’s the closest.”

“Sold,” Anakin declared, rolling them sideways towards the approximate place that spun on the map under Padmé’s hands. 

It was as easy as Padmé had said it would be, though they’d agreed to monitor their progress in shifts until they made it to a less risky route. That happened some twenty hours later, when they dropped out of hyperspace and decided to put the ship into orbit around an abandoned fuelling station, out towards the edges of the Mid Rim, and finally get some sleep.

Obi-Wan was still awake, however, when Anakin again entered his berth without the benefit of a knock. He didn’t hesitate this time before flicking back the covers and moving closer to the wall. Anakin slid in behind him, moulding himself to Obi-Wan’s back and tucking his legs up so they were touching from sternum to toes. Obi-Wan shuddered involuntarily as the bright flare of the Force behind his eyes as they were connected once more, as they were always meant to be. 

“We left our men,” Anakin told him, as if it wasn’t a thought that already haunted him. “And Ahsoka must still think I’m dead.”

“Ahsoka will grieve, but she will survive: you taught her too well for her not to,” Obi-Wan began. “And Master Yoda gave his word he would come up with a way for what remains of the 501st and the 212th to stay on Coruscant until it was time to face Palpatine. He even spoke of moving them closer to the Temple, under the pretence of using them to train younglings in military tactics.”

Anakin huffed, softly.

“And you think the Sith won’t notice there’s something odd about that?”

Anakin had stopped using Palpatine’s name only recently. Obi-Wan had no idea what that meant.

“Perhaps, but perhaps the appearance of the necessity of sending untested younglings into battle will further fuel his belief that he has already won.”

Anakin said nothing in reply, but Obi-Wan could sense his wakefulness.

“I’m sorry—” Anakin blurted, more loudly than required considering how close they were. “I never thought you were a coward.”

Obi-Wan sighed and went to turn over, but Anakin’s arm tightened, making it clear he wanted him to stay in place. 

“Perhaps I am a coward,” he replied, addressing the wall in front of him.

Anakin squeezed him tighter for a second, and Obi-Wan widened his eyes involuntarily at the strength of Anakin’s embrace.

“No, Master, never. You are the best Jedi I know, the best man.” 

“Anakin, we both know that’s not true.”

“Why? I don’t know that,” Anakin insisted.

“Well, the way I feel about you, for example, is not exactly within the realms of Jedi teachings.”

Anakin was silent, and Obi-Wan waited with his breath in his throat, ready for anything: for Anakin to change the subject, to storm out, even to pretend to be sleeping. Their Force bond had gone silent and still: a sure sign Anakin was blocking him with all his might. He usually did it when he was angry, as if it wasn’t clear to Obi-Wan when he was on the verge of losing his temper even without their connection in the Force. Then his arms loosened and Obi-Wan took it as permission to turn over and face him.

Obi-Wan waited. It had to be Anakin who chose this: anything else would be a betrayal. 

Without meeting his eyes, Anakin closed the gap between them, pressing his lips firmly to Obi-Wan’s. Despite expecting it, despite wanting it, for a moment Obi-Wan couldn’t even think how to respond. 

“Please,” Anakin said, kissing him again. 

Obi-Wan had never expected to have this. It was a type of intimacy that, as far as he knew, only Padmé had been allowed to witness. Obi-Wan pushed his hands through Anakin’s thick hair and deepened the kiss. Anakin kissed him back, his desperation pulsing through their bond: to be closer, to be held, to be loved. Obi-Wan gave as much as he could, pushing away their clothes until they were skin to skin, rocking against each other, their sweat and breath making the air between them humid and hot.

“Tell me,” Anakin demanded, arching up, his feet braced on the bunk.

Obi-Wan kissed his shoulder, his neck, their bond electric and taught, pulling them towards the brink of orgasm.

“I love you,” he whispered into Anakin’s ear, as if saying it quietly would undo all the damage he could cause with those words: a love so great he feared what he could do in its name.

Then bright, unfettered joy washed through Anakin and Obi-Wan, for the moment at least, banished his doubt. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


The next morning Obi-Wan dallied as much as he could. He showered and shaved and put some of his clothes through the washer. Anakin hadn’t been there when he’d awoken and the sheets where he’d slept had been cold.

He knew without a doubt that Anakin would never have come to his bed without Padmé’s approval—by all accounts she had been the one to send him to Obi-Wan’s bed the first time—but he still felt disappointed in himself for never broaching the subject with her himself. Although at what opportunity he couldn’t have said.

Finally he could find no more excuses and he made his way to the front of the ship. Though he would never admit it to anyone, he hesitated before the bridge when he realized that both Anakin and Padmé were there, then took a deep breath and entered. 

“Ah, excellent! Obi-Wan!” Padmé clapped her hands together and Obi-Wan stopped in the doorway, wary of her enthusiasm.

The swirl of hyperspace lit her hair oddly, Anakin was sitting slumped behind her in the pilot’s seat paying no attention to the ship which was on autopilot. 

“Yes?” he replied, his hesitance turning it into a question.

“Padmé thinks we should talk,” Anakin muttered to his knees.

“And you agreed?” 

Anakin shrugged, with all the sullenness of a disappointed five year old.

“Perhaps these things should be allowed to develop naturally,” Obi-Wan suggested to Padmé, who gave him a look that clearly stated what she thought of that idea. 

“I’ll leave you to it,” she told them, leaning down to give Anakin a slightly more than polite kiss, then pausing by the doorway to kiss Obi-Wan on the cheek.

Obi-Wan stepped fully into the room, the door shutting behind him. As she’d passed him, Padmé had dropped something in his pocket and he was determined not to think about what it could be. 

“Well—” Obi-Wan started, but Anakin cut him off.

“You regretted it,” he accused, standing. 

Obi-Wan sighed. Of course that’s what Anakin would think. Obi-Wan had never met another Jedi as black and white in their thinking: one was either with him or against him, there was no _via media_. 

“Anakin, for more than thirty years I have struggled to walk the path that all Jedi must walk: care but not possession; love but not envy; passion but not anger. And here I have definitive proof that I have failed, that I must spend the rest of my life guarding myself from the dark side, from the feelings that, in someone not trained in the Force would merely be an excessive emotion, but for us could mean the destruction of not only ourselves, but possibly those around us. You will have to forgive me some regret at that. I love you no less because of it.” 

“You love me,” Anakin repeated, real wonder in his voice and Obi-Wan resisted the urge to sigh again. Perhaps this was a conversation they would need to have more than once.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, hoping to pull him back on track.

“I won’t let you fall to the dark side,” Anakin told him, and even without their bond Obi-Wan could hear the unspoken _alone_ at the end of that statement.

“Unsurprisingly, I don’t find the idea of you following me into the dark all that comforting,” Obi-Wan replied.

“We’ll talk to Padmé about it,” Anakin said, taking a step closer. “She’d kill us if it ever became necessary. If we ever became a danger, she’d play along and then put a blaster bolt in both our heads while we slept.”

Obi-Wan blinked a little at the image, but he could believe it. It was a comfort, actually, and he could see that Anakin felt the same way.

“You ask a lot of the people who love you.”

“Nothing they aren’t capable of giving.” 

Obi-Wan looked away at that. He hadn’t been capable of giving Anakin this, not until he’d thought he’d lost him forever.

“Hey,” Anakin added, stepping close enough to put a hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “None of that matters now. I’m here and you’re here and you—”

“I love you,” Obi-Wan finished for him when it was clear he couldn’t go on. 

“Yes,” Anakin swallowed heavily. “That.”

Anakin looked at him, a little wildly and Obi-Wan gave in and kissed him. 

It turned out that Padmé had indeed dropped a small tube of lubricant in his pocket, which had made Anakin blush all the way down to his stomach. They hadn’t even made it to a flat surface, instead testing the weight-bearing strength of one of the flight chairs like a couple of teenagers. Afterwards Obi-Wan had sent Anakin off to clean up and check on Padmé. Although she had made it very clear that she approved of this new direction their relationship had taken, Obi-Wan still owed it to her to talk about it at some point, and soon. 

His berth was pleasantly warm and the folded blanket he’d placed on the floor to meditate on was soft and comfortable. He felt balanced, which was ridiculous as the line he walked with Anakin was a dangerous one indeed: to feel so strongly for another, to love so deeply.

But despite this the Force flowed evenly around him, and he felt as if he had stepped away from some unseen ledge in the dark.

He folded himself into his usual position, his legs crossed and back straight, as he had first been taught to do so long ago he barely remembered the teacher. Only her calm voice, her endless patience. 

Anakin rose first in his mind as he took a deep breath: Anakin laughing and shouting, Anakin fighting and calm. Anakin panting and spent, his hands wound around Obi-Wan, holding him close. 

And Anakin as he had never been: dead and still and silent. 

Then Obi-Wan was bent forward over his legs, his spine unaligned and hands fisted in the blanket below him as he finally cried. Great sobbing breaths escaped him, loud in the small space, and he put a fist to his mouth to hold in the noise. It didn’t matter, as less than a minute later his door slid open. He expected Anakin, but it was Padmé who sat on the floor in front of him and wrapped her slim arms around him, pulling his head down to rest on her shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just an epilogue to go! I _really_ didn't mean for this to get so long...


	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this took longer than I thought it would. 
> 
> Un-beta'd.

The air on Dagobah was supposed to be breathable but Padmé was certain there had been some error in whatever initial terraformed event had occurred there: it was like breathing in soup: hot, soil-tasting soup that formed beads of moisture on every surface it touched and made one’s hair fluff up to six times its normal size. 

There had been no sign of the inhabitants that Jedi records claimed lived there, so they had made their camp on the western side of the massive central continent that formed most of the world’s landmass. It was a relatively small planet, with days that were almost half that of a standard day. Padmé had taken to napping for a few hours during the first night, and then having her usual seven hours during the second. Anakin and Obi-Wan had insisted on staying awake for a full two days of the planet and only sleeping once in the 27 hour time period. 

They retreated to the ship at night, where the engines would lend them enough power for a year or so worth of air cooling and power as long as they were careful about it. Not that they planned to be there that long.

By the second week Anakin and Obi-Wan seemed to have regained most of their ease around each other. She could tell that Obi-Wan was still treading carefully around her and she had yet to come up with a way of telling him that there could be no jealousy between them: they had each known that Anakin loved the other from the start. She was wary though of stepping over a line, as she had done when they’d believed Anakin dead. How to approach the man who would not raise a subject he clearly thought would be an invasion of her privacy, and yet gave no indication of the appropriateness of raising that issue with him?

Still, they would have time enough she hoped. Sometimes she could hardly look at herself in the mirror, could hardly believe she had abandoned her life’s work to hide at the edge of the galaxy. But then Anakin would give her a smile, or Obi-Wan would do something impossible with the Force, and she would be reminded of how precious they were: how necessary both to herself and to the galaxy. They would not have thought of this plan by themselves—it was too wary, too careful—and she would not have considered it had it not been for Anakin’s apparent death. Obi-Wan wouldn’t have either, now that she thought about it. He had been desperate and dying too, in a way: stuck in an uncontrolled dive towards enemy fire. 

She paused as she made her way towards the nearest stream to lift where her hair had escaped its coil and stuck to her neck. 

They had food in the form of ration bars but she had no plans to live on those alone. She had started researching the planet’s fauna and flora from the moment they arrived, partly out of genuine interest and partly as an excuse to give Ani and Obi-Wan some space. Obi-Wan did the same, disappearing into the jungle for hours at a time, although he managed to make it look far more natural than Padmé was sure she was being.

There were fat, green beetles that lived under a particular root that reminded her of a Naboo delicacy: roasted lace flies. On Naboo they only hatched once every eight years, but here the beetles bred in their hundreds. She picked up another and put it in the covered basket she held over one arm, resisting the urge to wipe at the sweat that was caught on the nape of her neck. It would only return, less than a minute later. 

Obi-Wan had joined her only a few minutes before, and she was aware of him doing something or other towards the edge of the swamp behind her. Not looking for beetles, of that she was sure. He’d politely tried one before declaring they weren’t for him. Ani refused to try one or to kiss her after she’d eaten them until she’d cleaned her teeth. She’d just picked up a fallen log when she heard an aborted cry and turned to see Obi-Wan go down in the mud.

She dropped her basket, taking three steps towards him and crouching down.

“What is it?” she asked, bracing herself for whatever horror had brought this strong man to his knees.

“The Jedi,” he gasped. “They’re dying.”

Padmé gripped his hand hard between hers, her thoughts jumping to Anakin, but Obi-Wan shook his head.

“Not here, but everywhere else Jedi exist: they are dying and dead. By the Force, we have failed.” 

“No, no,” she told him, fiercely. “We knew this was a possibility. _You_ are Jedi, and you have given the Order a chance to go on.”

Rapid footsteps revealed themselves to be Anakin, who skidded to a stop as he emerged from the thick undergrowth.

“Master?” Anakin asked, and Obi-Wan reached out to him with his other hand.

They stayed like that—crouched together in the mud, hands linked—long enough for Padmé’s skirts to be sodden all the way to her underwear, her clothes saturated and heavy. She was well used to ignoring her discomfort and did so now, concentrating on the grip of Obi-Wan’s hand in hers: the tightening that told her another Jedi was gone, the relaxing that told her he hoped it was over, only to be wrong, for there to be more deaths and yet more. Padmé didn’t know how many Jedi there were in the galaxy and the Order had always been wary of giving out exact numbers, but she thought that a great many of them had died while the sun made its way across the sky and the shadows between the trees and the vines grew darker. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It took two hours for Anakin to confirm that there was nothing wrong with their signal, comms array, or power: both the HoloNet and the Comms system were down. 

“Perhaps it’s just in this sector,” Padmé offered, but Obi-Wan shook his head.

“The comms perhaps, but the HoloNet is constructed to be self-supporting: even if somehow the arrays for one sector were taken off-line, signal and power would automatically be boosted from the next nearest array. It is not like the comms system in that planets are responsible for their own arrays: it was built all at once under one directive.”

“Well, it’s definitely not us,” Anakin concluded as he stood up and stretched. “Every link-up and cable is working perfectly.”

“Therefore,” Padmé countered. “Someone could have built in a way to take down the whole thing.”

“I would like to say that sounds far fetched, but it seems I have been vastly underestimating the ingenuity of our enemies for some time,” Obi-Wan said. 

He was pale and his eyes strayed to Anakin more often than usual, as if checking he was still present. He had done the same on the ship before Anakin had taken the Sith bracelet off: it was unnerving to see him revert back to the nervous habit. 

There seemed nothing to do but wait, after that. Padmé, with help from Anakin, was able to convince Obi-Wan that he had time to go shower and change out of his mud-sodden clothing. Padmé was unsure what to do, if she should grieve for her friends in the Jedi, perhaps even in the Senate. She had never been in a situation where she was unable to confirm an event and, although she had seen too much of the Jedi’s skills to doubt Ani and Obi-Wan, she still could not bring herself to believe that the Jedi were gone without proof. 

Finally, after three hours of waiting, the comms unit flickered to life.

Ani turned from here he had been taking apart the lighting system of the cockpit and Obi-Wan stood from his meditative pose. Only Padmé had not been pretending to do anything other than stare at the comms array, willing it to turn back on, so she was the first to see the barely-there hologram of Master Windu.

“This is Master Mace Windu,” he began, and Padmé reached back for Anakin’s hand. She noticed he held Obi-Wan’s hand in his other. “I regret to be the bearer of such terrible news, but The Jedi Order is no more and the Republic has fallen. Do not return to the Temple, it is no longer safe. An Empire is rising, and those who remain must come together to fight this terrible evil. May the Force be with you…. This is Master Mace Windu. I regret—”

Obi-Wan reached over and flicked off the recording. The silence was terrible, and yet Padmé could think of nothing to say.

“Will he come here?” Anakin asked. He sounded very young. 

Obi-Wan cleared his throat before answering. “I’m not sure, there are many unknowns but—” He put his hand over his mouth and Padmé reached out to him. He accepted her half embrace before continuing. “I would think this would be his most likely destination, if he could guarantee that he would not be followed.”

“Do you think there are others?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan replied, unwavering in his faith as always. “We are not the last of the Jedi, Master Windu and Master Yoda would never allow it.”

  
  
  


When they were contacted again it was through narrow-band comms rather than the regular wide-array, which meant the ship had to be in very close range. 

_“—ster Kenobi, we are experiencing difficulties locat—— atmospheric disturban—”_

Padmé pushed away from the console table and ran to the cargo bay, throwing open a small hatch and fumbled for a moment before finding what she was looking for. Not bothering to run back to the main doors, she punched in the code for emergency airlock release and jumped the short distance to the muddy ground. 

Knocking off the safety catches she set off the two flares she was carrying, their purple smoke pluming high into the air.

“Padmé?” Obi-Wan’s voice came from around the side of the ship. 

She didn’t get a chance to explain, as Anakin chose that moment to jump out of the airlock behind her, his hair in disarray and his robes half closed. He’d gone to meditate some hours ago but looked more as if he’d been asleep. He had pillow creases along his jaw, Padmé noted with deep fondness.

“They’re coming!” he announced, breathless.

Padmé thought she should perhaps offer some clarification, but that was apparently enough for Obi-Wan. He looked up, his eyes narrowed.

“Yes, I think I can sense them,” he said. “I believe they’re coming from the North West meaning their most likely landing grounds will be the clearing near the stream.”

Padmé passed him the other flares and he took off at a run, she and Anakin following behind. They took a shortcut she normally avoided due to the thick vines, but Ani helped her through and they arrived just as the first rumbles of an approaching craft could be heard.

“Can you feel them all?” Anakin asked, in that half-thought way that meant he was talking to Obi-Wan. 

“Yes, I feel them.”

Padmé looked to Obi-Wan, who was better at translating when Ani was being extra Jedi-like.

“Master Windu is on that ship, and he has brought the younglings with him.”

Sure enough, when Master Windu emerged from the battered transporter, he had a tiny Tortuga boy in his arms and Mirialan girl was clutching his robes. Behind him came more than a dozen children, the oldest no older than nine. 

Padmé, Anakin and Obi-Wan walked around the edges of the swamp to meet them. Once they were close enough some of the children gasped and ran forwards to meet Ani and Obi-Wan. Padmé reached out to a little girl with tears on her face who clutched her hand with an iron grip. So few Jedi, out of so many.

But they would be enough. They had to be.


End file.
